How Marketing Your Own Offering is Like Cleaning Your Own Kitchen

After nearly 25 years of a/b tests, research data, and experience, it's a no-brainer to fix anyone's marketing. Anyone's but my own.

Why is that? Does it happen to other people? I hope so (because otherwise I'll really feel like an idiot.)

I can look at your site (or your marketing) and tell you precisely where you are missing the mark. It's so easy. Change this headline, move that form, alter that price, and here's your main benefit baby!

But now, here I am with a site launch of my own and it's absolutely agonizing. I do my best. Then we go live. My friends and colleagues start emailing me in response. What about this? How about that? OMG, now I see how to fix it! Call the web team, get them back to work pronto! No weekends off for anybody.

For my own products, my marketing eyesight is a little off... like I'm farsighted and squinting to see something that's way too close to me. It's awkward. Part of it's humility. I'm embarrassed bragging about my own stuff, it even feels a bit distasteful. (I think it's easier for men - at least based on the men in my field.) Part of it is I'm crap at pricing. (It's a joke among my advisory board - take Anne's price and double it and that's maybe where it should be.)

The weird thing is, during all this awkwardness, when I'm realizing how bad I am at marketing my own stuff, I'm doing favors, helping other friends and colleagues with their sites. And that's so EASY. I'm swift, deft, and authoritative. It's all based on research data -- my marketing brain's been percolated in research for so many years that I probably don't have a thought there's not a study to support. It's all rock solid. They change things based on my advice, they make more money. Duh.

Just ask me to do it for myself. OMG.

There's this saying that my girlfriends and I have -- it's a million times easier to clean another woman's kitchen than your own.

I think it's true for marketing too.